1835: More Five Tribes

Got the chance to break out my new board game acquisition Five Tribes at our fortnightly gaming evening tonight, and it seemed to go down pretty well. It’s also an intriguingly different experience when played with four people compared to just two.

One nice thing about the game is that there’s not really any randomness once you’re into the game itself — with the exception of the available cards — but the setup is totally random, making for a very different experience each time you play.

This time around, it just so happened that a couple of the tiles we laid out at the beginning of the game had three of the same coloured meeple on them right at the start, meaning these spaces could be immediately claimed for some early points. This made for a peculiar dynamic that was something of an inversion of what you might expect from your typical Euro-style game: normally, the early stages of a Eurogame see you building up and preparing for the mid-to-late game, where you’ll be scoring the majority of your points. This formula is clearly seen in everything from Settlers of Catan (early game: building roads; late game: building cities) to Agricola (early game: OMG HOW DO I FEED MY FAMILY; late game: OMG HOW DO I FEED MY FAMILY NOW IT’S EVEN BIGGER THAN IT WAS) but our playthrough of Five Tribes this evening proved to be the opposite: there was a lot of early point-scoring, and then things tailed off somewhat as “good” moves became harder and harder to spot, and play became a lot more strategic.

Five Tribes is apparently quite well known for inciting that perennial bugbear of board game gatherings, “analysis paralysis”, or certain players’ inability to take a turn without considering every possible option and all the potential consequences. Indeed, I can see how that would be the case — we saw a certain amount of it this evening — but at least the straightforward, simple game mechanics mean that actually taking your turn is quick and easy with minimal housekeeping required.

I like the game a lot. It’s interesting, simple to understand but strategically complex. I don’t think I’ve quite got my head around what winning strategies for it might look like, but I’m glad it went down well with the group, and I hope it hits the table again sometime soon. Its relatively short duration would seem to make it an ideal weeknight game, and everyone seemed to both pick it up quickly and enjoy themselves overall. So I call that a success.

I think I’m going to be seeing coloured meeples in my sleep tonight…

1832: Five Tribes

I got a belated Christmas present the other day: a new Days of Wonder board game called Five Tribes.

Days of Wonder games are always a pleasure to behold. They include high-quality components, look great on the table and, more often than not, feature a nice balance between simple, straightforward rules that anyone can understand and some complex strategy that will get your brain chugging away. Five Tribes appears to be no exception.

Unfolding on a randomly-generated map of a fictional sultanate in the lands of the 1,001 Nights, Five Tribes tasks you with taking control of as much of the map as possible, perhaps with a little supernatural assistance. This is achieved through an interesting mechanic slightly akin to how you move armies around in Risk.

Each tile begins with a few coloured meeples on it. These are drawn from a bag at the start of the game, so the arrangement of both the tiles that make up the map and the meeples on them is different each time you play. On your turn — the order for which is determined by a simple bidding system — you can grab a whole tile’s worth of meeples and then move one tile at a time, dropping one meeple on each tile you pass through. The last tile you land on has to have at least one meeple of the colour you’re trying to put on it already, and you then claim all meeples of that colour from the tile. If this empties the tile, you take control of it with a natty little wooden camel game piece.

That’s the basic mechanic, and by itself this would make an interesting and strategic game. But things get interesting when you throw the different colours’ special abilities into the mix. Yellow meeples can be kept and scored for points at the end of the game, for example; white meeples can either be kept for scoring at the end or spent on certain benefits throughout the game; red meeples allow you to either assassinate a meeple a certain number of tiles away (potentially allowing you to take control of another tile in your turn); blue meeples allow you to score points immediately according to how many specially marked spaces are surrounding the tile you finished on; green meeples allow you to take cards from the “market”, which are either slaves (which can be expended in much the same way as the white meeples) or various luxury goods.

Then each space has a special ability that you use if that’s where you finished your move: some force you to place a palm tree or palace marker on that space, making it worth additional points at the game’s end for whoever ends up controlling the space, if anyone; others allow you to acquire the services of one of several different djinni, each of whom has their own active or passive abilities to further your own plans for domination.

The aim of the game is to score more points than anyone else; a nice twist on this is that your points is also how much money you have on hand to do things. There isn’t a lot to spend your money on — it’s mostly used on bidding for turn order at the start of each round — but there are plenty of means of acquiring more money as you progress. The cards depicting the luxury goods are particularly important here: selling a “suit” of these cards (a set where every card contained therein is different) allows you to earn amounts of money according to how many cards you get rid of at any one time. Some djinni can help you earn money, too; others provide a passive bonus that can make the difference between winning or losing.

It’s an interesting game. My first game with Andie saw us flailing around a bit to begin with as we had no real idea of how it worked or what we should be trying to do. But it became clear as the game progressed, and I’m looking forward to trying it again sometime now I have a better understanding of how it all works.

1685: Murder on the Mystery Express

Today’s afternoon and evening was spent playing board games, beginning with a go at Lords of Waterdeep with both components of the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion — an essential addition for anyone who likes the base game — then following up with some Love Letter, Boss Monster and finally a Days of Wonder game I’ve had on my shelf for nearly 5 years now and never played a complete game of: Mystery Express.

Mystery Express is a “whodunnit” game with unsubtle Murder on the Orient Express influences. Thematically, you’re attempting to solve a murder on the train before it arrives in Istanbul; mechanically, you’re using various means of acquiring and sharing information to make deductions about the perpetrator, their motive, their modus operandi, the location of the crime and the time it took place.

Each turn in the game represents a leg of the journey from Paris to Istanbul, and permits players a certain number of in-game hours to perform various actions, represented by the different carriages of the train. In one car, you all pass cards around the table in a big circle; in another, you ask everyone to publicly reveal a card of a particular type; in another still, you’re able to gamble on a 50/50 chance — your opponent hiding a little miniature bag in one of their hands — in order to outright take one of their cards.

The cards each include the pieces of information necessary to solve the crime, with the exception of the time. The twist is that there are two copies of each card, so rather than just attempting to figure out which one is completely absent, you’re attempting to figure out which one there’s only one of. This can be extremely tricky due to the fact that cards get passed around the table throughout each turn, so the only means of reliably guaranteeing that something is definitely not relevant to the crime is seeing two copies of it on the same turn. There is, however, an interesting discard mechanic in place to prevent a player simply showing you the same card over and over again — or indeed you passing a card you just took from a player back to them — but this has the intriguing side-effect of meaning that information becomes more and more scarce as each round progresses.

The time of the crime, meanwhile, is represented by 24 cards, each of which have an analogue clock printed on them. There are three of each of the eight possible times in the deck, and one of them is hidden under the board as the truth, meaning in this case you’re looking for the one time there are two, not three copies of. And, unlike the other types of card, you only get three chances to look at these throughout the game: the first time, one player gets to flip over one card at a time at a rate of their choosing; the second time, another player deals out the whole deck to everyone, then tells them when to pass their part of the deck around at the rate of their choosing; the third and final time, a player reveals the cards one at a time into three stacks at a rate of their choosing. If, as happened tonight, the player in control of the time cards is lucky enough to be absolutely sure of the right time early in the game, they can then whip through the subsequent time phases extremely quickly, thereby giving themselves an advantage while putting those who are still trying to work it out at something of a disadvantage.

I enjoyed the game overall. The instructions are a little overwhelming initially — as is the iconography on the board — but after a little while it all becomes second nature, particularly as each player has a handy reference guide to help them out. I like deduction games a lot — another Days of Wonder favourite is the excellent Mystery of the Abbey — and this provides enough twists on the usual formula to keep things interesting.

Mostly, though, I’m just glad I finally got to play a game of it to completion. Turns out it’s pretty good; hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to play it again at some point in the near future.

1088: Shadows Over Camelot

I had some friends over tonight. (I’m still reeling from the novelty of being able to invite my friends over and them actually coming because I’m not a two-hour drive away from them, but I digress.) We played some Wii U (Nintendo Land is still great) and then settled down for a board game.

Tonight, it was the turn of Shadows Over Camelot, a new acquisition that I got for Christmas. It’s a game that we’ve had on our collective radar as a board gaming group for quite some time, but none of us knew that much about it. All we really knew is that it had a mechanic similar to that found in the Battlestar Galactica board game (which is absolutely excellent, even for those unfamiliar with the show) in that there was a chance with every game that one player would be a secret traitor tasked with foiling the group’s otherwise cooperative attempts to beat the game at its own… you know.

Shadows Over Camelot is a Days of Wonder production, and anyone who is into board games will know what that means — a nice hefty box with quality artwork, decent components, lovely thick gameboards and nice stiff cards that are easy to handle and shuffle. The only slight letdown with Shadows Over Camelot’s components is with some of the miniatures provided — a few of them have unnecessarily “bendy” bits — swords in particular are very soft and bendy, though I suppose it’s better that than them be rigid and easily breakable — or, for that matter, sharp and easy to poke into bits of delicate skin and make yourself bleed. (I speak from experience — Games Workshop’s dungeon crawlers mauled me more than a few times in the past.)

I’d read through the instructions when I first got the game, but it didn’t make a ton of sense without sitting down and actually trying it out for ourselves. We nearly didn’t try it at all because as a group, we’re generally terrible with new games — they tend to take twice as long as the suggested amount of time given on the game box, and we inevitably mess something up along the way. It had already got to 9pm by the time we’d eaten, so the worry was that we’d be there until the early hours of the morning playing.

Fortunately, there was no such problem, as Shadows Over Camelot actually has pleasantly simple, elegant mechanics that give it a nice, fast pace that constantly keeps flowing around the table — again, much like many other Days of Wonder titles.

Essentially, the aim of the game is twofold: firstly, do not allow any of the “defeat” conditions to come to pass, and secondly, ensure that victory is achieved. The players (except the traitor, if there is one) lose if there are twelve siege engines outside Camelot, if all the player characters die, or if the Round Table fills up and there are more black swords than white ones. Or if there are seven or more black swords, which amounts to much the same thing.

White and black swords are attained by going on quests, each of which are represented by small boards, and all of which are takes on Arthurian legends. You have the tournament against the Black Knight, the quest for the Holy Grail, fending off invasions, fighting dragons and claiming Excalibur.

Each quest has its own specific mechanics, but most involve playing cards in various arrangements. The Grail quest, for example, demands that players, between them, play a total of seven Grail cards onto the quest area — though if various “anti-Grail” cards appear, additional Grail cards must be played to remove these, too. Combat-focused quests, meanwhile, involve playing various poker-style hands one card per turn in an attempt to accumulate a high enough value to defeat the value of the black cards the game mechanics have been putting on the quest in the meantime. It’s difficult to describe in words, but when playing, it makes sense very quickly.

A turn is simple and snappy. First of all, you do a “bad thing” — either take a point of damage, add a siege engine outside Camelot or draw a black card, which has one of a variety of bad effects. Later in the game, black cards that would normally be played on a quest that has now been completed summon additional siege engines, so the late game involves fending back the tides of darkness while attempting to push the game into a victory state.

Once your “bad thing” has been done, you get to do a “good thing”. This can be as simple as moving, or performing an action unique to the quest you’re currently standing on — playing a card, for example. Alternatively, there are some special cards you can play with specific useful effects, or you can even heal yourself by discarding a set of three identical cards. It’s cooperative in that you are working together to defeat the game, but each player maintains their own independence to do as they please. Meanwhile, the traitor is doing their best to remain hidden while screwing everyone over as much as possible.

We were surprised when the game was over within an hour and a half — that’s absolutely a new record for us when trying out a new game for the first time, and testament to Shadows Over Camelot’s simple but elegant mechanics. I’m impressed, in short, and looking forward to trying it again, this time with a traitor — we followed the game’s recommendation and played without one this time. Hopefully that will be pretty soon!

#oneaday Day 950: It’s a Small World After All

Board game night (well, whole day, really) today and the star of the show was very much Days of Wonder’s excellent lightweight strategy game Small World.

For the uninitiated, Small World casts players in the role of some sort of omniscient entity guiding the development of several different races struggling for supremacy in a world that isn’t big enough for all of them. Players must capture territory and make use of their various peoples’ special abilities to score as many points as possible after a set number of turns have elapsed.

To begin with, a variety of random civilisations are created by matching a race with a trait. This determines two things: that people’s combination of special abilities, and the initial number of tokens the player will be able to take into their hand. Each race has a special characteristic and so does the trait, making for a very wide array of possible civilisations.

You might be in control of a bunch of seafaring dwarves, for example, meaning that you get score bonuses for every mine you capture, and are also the only people able to capture aquatic territories. Or you could have control of a band of pillaging giants, who find it easier to attack enemies near mountains, and who gain additional bonuses if they captured an occupied territory rather than an empty one.

If a people is no longer proving efficient at scoring points — perhaps a few conquests from the other players left their numbers a little depleted, for example — it’s possible to spend a run putting them “in decline”, which means they continue to score points so long as they are not obliterated from the map, and are unable to move or attack. The player then gets a brand new race to play with on the next turn.

The game is fast-paced, fun and exciting. Relatively little of it is dependent on luck, but the strategy isn’t so hardcore that it is inaccessible to newcomers. It has a fair bit in common with Risk, but is immediately superior due to the fact it doesn’t take three hours to play and inevitably end in a stalemate. The built-in time limit keeps play pacy, and the very design of the game ensures players are at each other’s throats as often as possible.

In short, its good reputation as a quality board game is well deserved. It’s straightforward and accessible enough for board gaming newcomers to be able to pick up right away, while its strategy has enough depth to keep things interesting — and pleasingly different each time you play.

There’s also an iPad version available, but this unfortunately only supports two players, while the physical version will take up to five.